TOWARDS STRONG SUSTAINABILITY: A FRAMEWORK FOR ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT OF MARINE PROTECTED AREAS

In this study, an operational tool for environmental accounting is proposed to assess natural capital value and to obtain a budget encompassing ecosystem services, putting into practice the notion of "ecosystem services cascade". The accounting system is based on a previous framework (EAMPA project) developed for MPAs. The tool implements some additional features bringing significant improvement of the framework in order to achieve sustainability. At this purpose two parallel accounts, ecological and economic, are developed and then compared aiming at achieving a net benefit from both domains. The economic approach considers, together to financial revenues and costs, all the direct and indirect benefits from MPA's ecosystem services fruition. The ecological approach is formulated so that results are obtained under a strong sustainability perspective and direct impacts on MPA natural capital, associated with ecosystem services fruition by MPA's customers, are taken into account and included into the budget.